Friday, March 11, 2016

Walter Haut - Lost in the Roswell Minutae

Over the years Walter
Haut made many recorded statements about what he had done and seen in Roswell
in July, 1947. For decades, all he had done, according to those statements,
including many to me, was write the press release. He had taken that release to
the various media outlets in Roswell… or he had called them and read the
release to them over the telephone. He signed an affidavit to that effect and
told the story to dozens of UFO researchers, reporters and documentary
producers.

Walter Haut on the set of "Roswell."
Photo copyright Kevin D. Randle

On April 20, 1989, I
talked to Haut briefly. I was asking about the events there in Roswell and he
was answering with one word answers which weren’t rude, just brief. Telling me
again of the event and how he hadn’t done all that much, he finally said, “I hate
to be that way but…” meaning just falling back on his standard answers
including that his only role was to write the press release.

In May, 1993, he
created and signed an affidavit saying basically the same thing. He had written
the press release, and that was it. That was all he knew. That was his only
involvement in the case.

But then, in 2000, he
began to hint that he had seen more. He told Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthaser
that he had been heavily involved. He later signed an affidavit prepared by Don
Schmitt suggesting he had seen the remains of the craft and he had seen one of
the bodies, or maybe more of them, it all just depended on which statement you
heard. He had kept the secret as he had promised back in 1947 and he didn’t
want this new affidavit released until after his death, though he certainly
hadn’t been overly quiet about these new claims. Here, now, was an affidavit by
one of the officers allegedly included in the inside circle of the staff,
signing a legal document that suggested he had seen alien beings. It was an
extraordinary document if it could be believed.

In the last couple of
years, I have been looking through the files, documents, transcripts and
newspaper clippings that I have collected over the years concerning the Roswell
case. I have, literally, file cabinets filled with the information so that my
review has not been as fast as it could have been.

The problem I found concerning
Haut is not that his earlier statements contradict his later statements, but
that his later statements were highly confused and highly contradictory. Haut is on the record in too many places
saying that all he did was write the press release. In fact, in one of those
earlier interviews filmed in 1979, Haut said, “Colonel
Blanchard told [me] to put out [a] news release concerning [the] flying disc
but that [I] couldn’t see it…”

In listening to
people describing what they had seen and done, you sometimes hear what are
often termed as “weasel words.” This means that they don’t want to lie but they
are attempting to avoid the truth. Frank Kaufmann was skilled at this. He was
famous for saying, “Well, I think so…” Not that something was true, but that “I
think so.”

But this statement by
Haut, made on film in 1979, is quite definitive. Haut was saying that Blanchard
was not allowing him to see it. No flipping or flopping but a strong, positive statement
that he stayed with for more than two decades.

Compare that
statement to those made in the interviews conducted after 2000, where he was
saying that he had only written the press release and then saying he had seen a
craft and the bodies. Or that he had seen one body and then back to the
original idea that he had only written the press release. He would often
contradict himself within a single paragraph and sometimes in a single sentence.
Anyone seeing these confused interviews would be concerned about the clear and
concise statements in that later affidavit. It is just too perfect given how
those statements have been gathered after 2000.

This one quote, “but
that [I] couldn’t see it,” tells us a great deal and I would suggest that it
tends to render that later affidavit as inaccurate at best. It would seem that
it suggests we should reject the affidavit in light of what he had said for
decades. I don’t know the motivation for his changing his mind about it. All I
know is that I find the original statements, especially that about not being
allowed to see “it” as much more persuasive than this affidavit cobbled
together from what seem to be the ramblings of a witness more than half a
century after the event. One statement was clear and concise and said many
times and the other was something that came more than a half century after the
fact and wasn’t all that clear . But then, it really comes down to what you
wish to believe and which statements you trust the most. For me it is those
given for so many years and not those that came so late in the game.

Given that Haut directed researchers to Kaufmann (as reliable and trustworthy) pretty much demonstrates the guy had a propensity to "fabricate" stories while also demonstrating his own willingness to embellish a fantasy.

His early statements seem spot on - he wrote the press release and nothing more. The latter claims no doubt fueled by personal ambitions.

What kind? Well we know from the museum website he and Dennis (also unreliable) wanted a UFO museum in Roswell. Haut's daughter ran the museum until her death from health related problems. She of course bitterly defended the amended (new) affidavit. From their website:

"In early 1990, Walter Haut, who had been public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947, began promoting the idea of a home for information on the Roswell Incident and other UFO phenomena.

He got together with Glenn Dennis, another Roswell Incident participant, and the two sought a home for a UFO Museum. This brought them to Roswell Realtor Max Littell, who helped find the first location for the Museum."

If you want to keep your business going including your reputation as a so called "first hand witness" then falsely expanding your initial story seems like a good thing to do. Helps your daughter's career too. His other buddies did the same thing, didn't they?

You may be a little harsh on Haut. I do not really know, but didn't Kevin and maybe others claim Haut was suffering the beginnings of dementia when he 'recalled' events for his 2nd affidavit?

And Kevin: Your date for Haut's early interviews must have been 1979, not 1978. If you think this is splitting hairs, it does matter because it was not until early '79 (from locating the newspaper reports) that Moore & Friedman knew Haut was involved at Roswell at all. The film you refer to came out in late '79, I believe ("UFOs are Real", at which Friedman was a consultant). Marcel had forgotten his name during his own early interviews. Little discrepancies like this can affect the timeline of events.

Your statement "[h]e had kept the secret as he had promised back in 1947 and he didn’t want this new affidavit released until after his death..." raises the possibility that he had lied or at least not told the whole truth until this second affidavit because of a secrecy oath he took. This is not to say this was actually the case, but it is plausible.

Nonethless, in the final analysis, unfortunately, it doesn't matter what Haut, Marcel, Sr, Marcel, Jr or any other alleged witness to the Roswell events said or say and how credible they said or say it. People will always question their validity.

And questioning it rightly so... they are making claims of seeing and handling debris from an alien spacecraft. We do not have samples of that debris, we have no pictures of it and we have questions about the witnesses embellishing their roles in this (well, except for Jesse Jr. who seemed to remain on the straight and narrow). So I have no trouble with people questioning the validity, especially as we uncover some problems with the tales they tell.

Loki -

I never claimed that Haut "jump started" the investigation. When we found someone who said he was in Roswell in 1947, I found myself calling Haut to see if the name appeared in the Yearbook. I finally asked him to make a copy for me, paid him for that copy. We were already deep in it when I got my copy.

Tommy -

Turned it off after the guy started spouting the nonsense about Mogul. When he said that the array contained rawin targets I knew that he didn't know what he was talking about. Rawins were not used in the New Mexico arrays. The first recorded flight, that is No. 5, has an illustration of the make up, without rawins.

I should have been more specific. The video shows two witnesses (Jesse Marcel Jr.) being given different types of metals, and plastics to handled to see if any of the material is familiar. The two witnesses appear to agree that it could be a Mylar plastic with a reflective surface that looks like metal, crumples up, and unfolds.

Based on this I would agree that it does not appear to be a Project Mogul test balloon, rather some other Top Secret project.

What comes to mind is maybe the government was testing radar reflecting material at high attitude. A balloon would make a good non-metal test platform.

I do not wish to get into another long discussion of balloons and Project Mogul. There is no evidence of the government testing radar reflecting material at high altitude in New Mexico at the time. Endless speculation about balloons does not advance the discussion. If it was some other top secret project, please tell us what it was since the Air Force failed to find it in the mid-1990s and if such a project existed that would explain the Roswell debris you can be sure they would have trotted it out.

And given the natural of the beginning of that video, I have very little confidence in how it was edited.

Walter Haut apparently was somewhat senile by the time the "last affidavit" was written, it would appear.

He did not write that affidavit, did he?

Wasn't Don Schmitt mainly responsible for the composition and wording of the 2000 document?

I understand Haut reviewed the affidavit before signing it, but if the content of that affidavit was primarily composed by Schmitt, isn't that a real problem, considering Schmitt's long history of deception and delusion in regard to the Roswell incident?

For some time now I've felt that whilst Roswell is, I think, a critically important case it needs to stripped right back to the basic core of information that can be established beyond reasonable doubt.

The witness statements need very careful handling - all of them - and are at best contextual information that might be useful.

-something crashed-The recovery of the debris was felt to be sufficiently important by Blanchard to warrant using his intelligence and counter intelligence officers-We know the weather balloon story was false from the USAF / GAO studies in the 1990's-The NYU Flight 4 hypothesis is totally falsified (I did say beyond reasonable doubt - not beyond controversy!)-We know it was not a plane crash, rocket or other recorded experimental device.-We know the debris was taken to another location(s) - and after that we loose definite track of it.

We may have a snapshot view of operations to recover the 'wreck' - the debate on that is certainly complex and probably not beyond reasonable doubt at this time, but I have my opinion on that.

After than we have less secure but broadly credible information, beyond the scope of this post which point to a RDB role in a technical study with an information feed from Blue Book (Ruppelt, Smith, Sarbacher etc)

I just wish we could find a way of focusing the debate on the really hard core of the issues and stripping out not just the lunatic fringe of the Roswell Slides and such like but also the vast mass of less secure (and ultimately useless) reports, but that's a forlorn hope I suspect.

The question about Don Schmitt composing the document is a complex one. Given that both Haut and his daughter, Julie, reviewed it carefully, I'm not sure that Schmitt's background is all that important. True, it would have been better had Haut written the document himself, but it is not uncommon for someone to compose such a document for the signature of someone else. There are some of the affidavits collected by FUFOR that were written by others for the signatures of the witnesses.

The real question is how accurate was the information that Haut was providing. Schmitt, of course, was biased in his thinking, but then it was Haut's statements that are the important thing and how they related to his decades of insistence that he only was involved with the press release.

Let's not forget the psychological aspect of "false memories" combined with the effects of aging.

Modern psychology has for some time validated how people with no personal motive of any kind can come to believe they experienced something which never happened. Haut's final testimony may be exactly that.

In 2000 the APA published a study which stated that it:

"....finds support for the theory that the more sources of perceptual information people have about an event--the sight, sound, feel or taste of an experience--the more likely they are to believe they actually experienced the event, even if they haven't. In particular, the "realness" of a false memory results from the brain's ability to pull together perceptual information from unrelated experiences and wrongly read it as a single, authentic memory.

This "source monitoring" theory of false memories postulates that people misattribute perceptual information experienced in a different context to support a memory for something that never happened.

The findings suggest that repeated exposure to certain objects and events through sight, sound or just imagination can muddle people's memories of where or how they experienced something or even whether their experience is real. In fact, the most compelling false memories may be those in which fragments of real experiences--viewing photos, hearing others recount events or daydreaming--play a role, the researchers say."

The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (Vol. 26, No. 2).

Kevin may be right that Schmitt had no substantial role in the thing, but I am inclined to believe that at the very least he was just one more source of perceptual data that could well have influenced Haut to BELIEVE he saw something he did not, combined with decades of interviews and reinforcing elements that when coupled with a failing memory made him elaborate well beyond his original testimony.

We can certainly debate whether Roswell is "a critically important case", although Kevin would probably prefer we did not.

There is nothing "critically important" about it unless, and it is a big unless, you really believe the USAF & US government is withholding the truth about the ET nature of the event for nearly 7 decades. Otherwise Roswell is merely another UFO landing case, of which there are many.

None of the six 'facts' as listed by Anthony Mugan is established as rock solid. Every one can be debated and/or refuted. In the first of these, nobody saw anything crash at all. They merely discovered debris in the desert.

So forget about it being 'critically important' - it is only so if certain commentators want it to be. But that can be said about the whole UFO phenomenon, right from its inception. Keyhoe's early writings focused on how serious and important the USAF considered the whole UFO business. Nowadays, certain individuals assume Rendlesham is the most important case in the UK, with much the same 'cover-up' allegations attached to it.

Kevin is entirely right about Haut's 2nd affidavit. It has no value whatever towards establishing what really happened.

I interviewed Haut for 2 hours in August 2001. I saw absolutely no signs of dementia at that time. Before he reviewed and finally signed the affidavit in 2002, he had been examined by a doctor who judged him to be of sound mind. I have seen absolutely no actual evidence that Haut was suffering severe or even moderate memory problems at the time of the affidavit, or back in 2000, when in a taped interview he reluctantly admitted to Wendy Connors of seeing a small, banged-up body and a recovered craft in a base hangar.

Connors only set up the interview after hearing Haut tell a German documentary film crew the same thing. He'd been dropping hints and telling some people confidentially for years that he knew more about the craft and bodies. His standard parting line in speeches and interviews was that he was convinced that an alien spacecraft had been recovered--just don't ask him why he believed that. Similiarly, in his original 1993 affidavit, his final comment was, "I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space."

I also found Haut to be a reluctant interviewee and he would tell me only generalities of what happened. Unlike Connors, I was a total stranger to him. It was the one and only time I ever met and spoke to him. I just happened to be visiting the Roswell museum, Don Schmitt was there, and set up the interview hoping Haut might tell me more about what happened. But he never told me anything sensational or incriminating.

I have the two Haut affidavits up on my website, critical excerpts from Connors' interview, plus a lengthy discussion of the circumstances around the 2002 Haut affidavit. There is also an article by Haut's daughter Julie Shuster (from the MUFON Journal) of how the affidavit was written and then repeatedly reviewed by Haut before signing.

My final comment is that I'm surprised Kevin is so easily dismissing the affidavit, after also telling us of interviewing a corroborating witness, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., who Kevin says he interviewed in the mid-1990s, or years before the affidavit. Harris' story was that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him about seeing a dead alien body. Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against it. In other words, Harris was telling us that Haut admitted to seeing an alien body clear back in 1947, not when he was old and allegedly senile or the evil Don Schmitt allegedly put words in his mouth.

In addition, Harris admitted that there had been a major cover-up. As the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery, something that would be totally pointless and unnecessary for any sort of minor balloon recovery. But a major clean-up operation of something of extreme secrecy that they wanted to keep buried indefinitely would require just that.

Seriously? You want to debate that something crashed? While I might argue that CPL Pyles saw the object in the air and you might argue that it was a meteor, there is the fact that something fell on the ranch. We know this because Brazel was in that particular field at least every other day. One day there is nothing and the next there is something... and depending on your point of view, it is spread out over a large area, or a somewhat more compacted area.

You really can't debate the point that Blanchard thought it was something important because his actions suggest that. They ordered the flight to Fort Worth... They gathered it all... they put out the press release.

You really can't debate the collapse of the weather balloon story. Even the Air Force admitted that it wasn't true. It certainly was a cover story about something. That they switched it out is not in dispute because they admitted that.

You can't debate the other crash possibilities such as aircraft or missiles because the Air Force said it was none of those and my research including visits to White Sands, Holloman, New Mexico state archives and research in various newspaper files proves this to be correct.

Just as clearly the debris was removed from the field and taken elsewhere. Some went to Fort Worth but there is really no record of it being destroyed in Roswell... only that it was moved to another location.

None of this moves us into the realm of alien visitation but these are facts and for some of them you might be the only person in the world who disputes them. They are documented, reinforced by testimony of the participants, and agreement with what the Air Force said...

So, the only point of dispute is that Mogul was responsible and while I know it will spark a new and useless debate, will note that Flight No. 4 was, in fact cancelled, and that a cluster of balloons with only a sonobuoy is not the long array that is required for Mogul to work. There are those who will debate this endlessly, never listening to what is said and rejecting the documented evidence.

My point is that five of those facts are facts and only one is open to debate and to me, the debate about it is over as well.

Didn't say the affidavit process began in 2000, said that was when he began to radically alter his tale.

I have listened to the Connors/Baltheser interview and I will say again, he changed his mind about what he had seen and what he had done inside of single paragraphs and sometimes inside of single sentences. Yes, he told of seeing a banged up body, or maybe it was two. Or maybe he didn't see it at all... You can argue that he was conflicted about revealing the secret he had kept for all these years, but the fact remains that his statements about this were contradictory.

But the real point is that I'm not "easily dismissing the affidavit" but am criticizing its accuracy given Walter's repeated statements to me over the years and his own statement that he asked Blanchard to see it and was told no.

And yes, he said in his 1993 affidavit that he was convinced it was alien, but that does not translate into him seeing anything. It means that he believed what others had told him, men whom he respected, but in the end, that is hearsay or second hand.

I qualified Harris' statements by pointing out he was deeply into UFOs, had a bookcase with a dozen or more books about UFOs and was a firm believer in the MJ-12 nonsense. While he suggested it was Walter who offered to show him a body (in violation of the security regulations and that Harris had no need to know) it is also possible that Harris was confused about who actually was going to show him (again in violation of security regulations).

I take your side over Haut and his 2nd affidavit. Harris told you in the mid-1990s that Haut supposedly told him in 1947 about 'bodies'. And where did Harris get the idea (in 1995 or so) that any bodies existed at all in 1947? You know the answer to that as well as I do. So why does David Rudiak, or anyone else, accept that Haut said anything about ET craft/bodies to Harris in 1947? How anybody can accept this tale as confirming evidence of any kind is beyond me.

Regarding the six points raised by Anthony Mugan, do you REALLY want a full discussion on these? I doubt it very much.

Taking the first (i.e. that something crashed), nothing was said to have crashed at the time. All that was reported was the landing and recovery of a light instrument. During the late 1970s it had metamorphosed into a 'crash', in time for the first Roswell book (surprise!).

Blanchard indeed ordered two intelligence officers out to see the stuff. He did think it important enough to do so. But he evidently decided the debris, and the whole affair, so UNimportant that he went on a 2-week vacation immediately afterwards.

Yes it looks as if the weather balloon story was false. But only marginally. All that changed was that in 1995 the USAF investigators decided it was still a balloon but another kind of balloon. Big deal!

Shall I go on? Yes SOMETHING tangible was recovered. Where is it now? If it was really important to science, and highly unusual, it ought to be in some museum by now, for the public to see, just like the mummy in those slides.

I can imagine that CDA once again typed the first thing that entered his mind when stating:

"nobody saw anything crash at all. They merely discovered debris in the desert."

This is an arguable point (can we stop using the word debate). Ok - "CPL Pyles saw the object in the air" but wasn't standing on the Foster Ranch at the time and therefore did not see anything fall from the sky onto the ground - I believe this is CDA's point.

CDA could do himself a favour by "conceding" that something crashed on the ranch - but he doesn't like to concede anything - this is a debxxx in his mind after all...

Another ridiculous possibility (and one that only CDA could dream up) is the stuff didn't crash but was planted there - for "publicity" reasons. Unfortunately the people that when to collect it simply didn't realise what it was.

I only wish that CDA had been a teacher at school - he might have believed me when I said a goat ate my homework...

Let's assume that they are both telling the truth - would you not agree that it would be more helpful if they both told the "full" story, the "first" time, without adding new information (any making their stories more "exciting") decades later?

This is where Lance quite rightly discredits them...

Kaufmann and Ragsdale are another couple of people that haven't helped the investigation - but of course this is taking us off topic again...

You want to discuss semantics? I will gladly substitute fell for crash. Makes no real difference because it is just a matter of semantics. You are simply unwilling to concede a single point. So, we all agree that something fell...

But then you agree that the original weather balloon story was false, so it is another fact that seems to be accepted...

But again, this will degenerate into another useless argument when it is clear that five of the points Anthony raised were facts. We move to interpretations and semantics from that point on.

Nitram -

When writing my original response to CDA, I forgot to mention William Woody who also saw something in the air falling to the ground. He thought it so close that he and his father went in search of it and they headed out, toward the Foster ranch when they went.

The one thing that seems to have been lost here is that conceding the points does not get us to the extraterrestrial... just to the unusual.

And let's not forget this was about Walter Haut's role in all this and why there are some problems with the second affidavit.

We are discussing Haut's affidavit(s). OK, we agree that his 2nd one is a hotch-potch and useless as evidence. But what about his first one in 1993?

There are two paragraphs that are dubious (items 7 & 8) and a third (item 9) that is plain wishful thinking. Remember, even this first one was written after 14 years of 'exposure' to interviews and constant questions from ET-biased researchers.

In para 9, Haut is only convinced the object "was some kind of craft from outer space" because investigators repeatedly put the idea into his head. Does anyone really believe Haut held this view in 1947? I certainly don't.

In para 8, did it really take 33 years (!) for Marcel to tell Haut that the material shown in those photos was not the debris he (Marcel) had recovered? Or is there another, far more likely, reason for Haut making such a statement?

In para 7 Haut says Blanchard was, or sounded, "positive" about what the debris was. Yet Haut does not tell us what Blanchard thought it was. What was he so "positive" about? An ET craft maybe? Despite this literally amazing and incredible discovery, Blanchard decided it was not important enough to remain on base and instead took his 2-week leave. He had no desire to be part of the ensuing excitement, such as attending meetings with high-ups in Washington on this great scientific news & discovery.

Yes, I would query his first affidavit as well, never mind his second.

Woody - So he saw this object fall in daylight or in the middle of the night in a massive lighting filled thunderstorm? If it wasn't in the storm it sort of dismisses the whole widley held belief a spaceship came crashing down at night from a lighting strike. Doesn't it? So when did he see this thing?

Debris - I have a problem with the suggestion of a second crash site containing a space craft about 24 feet in diameter (as some here claim as did Haut, right?) when people like Rudiak claim there were miles and miles of dense metallic debris at the first site reported. I can't figure out why you all think an object 24 feet in diameter and still largely intact could possibly create miles and miles of debris as it skipped off the ground. Your logic doesn't hold here unless you fictionalize the "mother ship ejection pod" nonsense which doesn't hold and has no basis in the evidence.

Haut - Yes his photo hangs on the wall at the Roswell Museum as do many of these "affidavits" yet the museum places them right next to MJ-12 documents and other nonsense that has long since been determined false and yet they present them as factual. It doesn't help your case at all when the "gurus" let that junk continue to be presented as "evidence".

Haut's final testimony is just one more piece of "the tourist show", don't you think? I can believe his first story as Kevin has stated, but clearly NOT his final remarks. His prior "hinting" at "more" means nothing as this could be interpreted in many ways given we know he already believed the alien crash story.

I just love the way that you assume that Haut didn't think about the alien aspect of this until UFO researchers put the idea into his head. You have absolutely no evidence for this idea but trot it out all the time.

I would say that Marcel and Haut didn't talk about the event after the initial blow up in 1947 and that Marcel and Haut weren't buddies who might not have talked all that often, though Marcel did live a couple of blocks down on the same street as Haut. So, really, you don't have much here other than your ideas which you continue to push even though they are pure speculation.

Brian -

If you had bothered to read Woody's affidavit, he said, "One hot night during the summer of 1947, probably early July, my father and I were outside on the farm. It was well after sundown and quite dark..." That would seem to answer your questions. Just look up his affidavit. (And just so we don't have to have an argument about the "early July" I freely admit that he might have assumed that based on the publicity that the Roswell case had gotten before I had a chance to interview him.)

The thunderstorm you mention happened some 70 miles away, near Corona and would have been invisible in Roswell. I have never suggested that the craft was brought down by lightning. I just don't believe that sentient beings who have defeated the problems of interstellar flight would be vulnerable to lightning.

Do not assign the logic of others to me. I don't believe there were miles and miles of metallic debris.

Nor is it relevant, at least here, where they have hung Walter's picture... this actually smacks of guilt by association. He didn't hang the picture. If you have an issue with MJ-12, I suggest you take it up with Stan. I certainly am not a believer in it and have exposed the fatal flaw in the Eisenhower Briefing Document.

"I just love the way that you assume that Haut didn't think about the alien aspect of this until UFO researchers put the idea into his head. You have absolutely no evidence for this idea but trot it out all the time."

Agreed, but can you show that Haut DID give the ET connection a thought between 1947 & '79? Your own Haut interviews are next to useless on this point as he had already been 'grilled' and influenced by the 'deadly duo' a decade earlier. (No I cannot prove this but it is a very reasonable assumption).

We don't even know whether Haut had seen any of the newspaper reports prior to their discovery in 1979. Marcel certainly would have seen some at the start, but apparently neither he nor Haut kept any of them. You can draw your own conclusions on this (which will differ from mine, no doubt).

Haut wrote his press release having never seen the debris. By 1993 he became "convinced" it was extraterrestrial and hinted that Blanchard was convinced as well. If Haut did not see the stuff for himself, someone must have persuaded (or convinced) him. I wonder who.

The only reasonable assumption in all this is that he forgot the whole episode for three decades. But again, I expect you will disagree.

Thanks Kevin. Based on your explanation, it would appear than that Woody's testimony really has nothing to offer. Just another "memory" of seeing something fall in 1947. Possibly influenced by Roswell hype, unclear as to date seen, and no real idea of what "fell". Just another meteor most likely.

...The "lunatic fringe" of the Roswell Slides is certainly not helping the cause and either are the tiresome references back to the work history of one well known researcher.........

Hello Nitram,

Can you please explain what "the cause" is?

I don't believe there are any "Roswell Slides" let alone a "lunatic fringe" of them. In relation to the slides, the word "Roswell" was used just once in Adam Dew's Kodachrome Documentary trailer, yet haters of the slides enigma/puzzle, like yourself can't get enough of referring to 'Roswell Slides' or 'Not Roswell Slides'.

Any idea of why that might be?

Am I one of the "lunatic fringe" because I don't subscribe to your undefined "cause", or even know what the heck it is, and don't feel the need to self-righteously finger-point at others regarding a so-called "fiasco"?

The cause is a dispassionate attempt to answer the questions about the source of UFO reports... alien? some kind of terrestrial but hidden society? interdimensional? time travelers? or just a bunch of natural phenomena that are misidentified bolstered by the enthusiasm of some researchers?

The connection of the slides of the unfortunate child is not Adam Dew's or Joe Beason's alone. On the Paranormal Podcast #393 with Jim Harold, Tom Carey said, "It was one of the Roswell bodies." Later he said, "To me it was one of the Roswell aliens...It looked exactly like what had been described to me as to what the body looked like from the crash."

So, the connection to Roswell was made by Tom Carey (and Don Schmitt also made that connection) and not by the "haters". Although they would sometimes claim that no such connection had been made, if you listen to their interviews, that is exactly what they thought... otherwise, why make a big deal out of the timing of the pictures?

There is no puzzle or enigma left. The image on the slides has been positively identified, the location of the photographs has been positively identified and the dates provided prove that the picture was taken prior to May 1947 which eliminates Roswell from the discussion.

And it was a fiasco because it attracted huge attention and fell into disgrace in 48 hours... had due diligence been properly performed, the I believe the placard would have been read prior to the fiasco and we could have avoided all of this... and by due diligence, I mean a demand to see the actual slide and not just scans of it. I believe that Dew and Beason knew exactly what was shown and that was why they were passing around scans. And given that we all now know what the placard said, they have disappeared from the scene leaving Tom and Don holding the bag.

"We don't even know whether Haut had seen any of the newspaper reports prior to their discovery in 1979. Marcel certainly would have seen some at the start, but apparently neither he nor Haut kept any of them. You can draw your own conclusions on this (which will differ from mine, no doubt)."

I am also surprised that nobody kept copies of such clippings or even kept some sort of diary note or something at the time of such a "historic event".

Doesn't mean it didn't happen though - but I would have expected we would have "recovered" some sort of paperwork that would tend to confirm this.

"...and by due diligence, I mean a demand to see the actual slide and not just scans of it."

I'm glad someone finally said this. I believe I have listened to all the Schmitt and Carey interviews since the slide fiasco because I use to be a huge Schmitt/Carey fan. I don't think anyone has asked them publicly why they didn't demand to see the original slides. I have read almost all of their books and even volunteered to accompany them on their Roswell digs as well as do FOIA work for them given my experience as a government FOIA paralegal while attending law school. So I was really disappointed in their slides investigation. However, I do highly respect Schmitt for his apology and I think the two of them just lost their objectivity because of their strong desire to find some real smoking gun evidence. We all make mistakes.

Of course we all make mistakes, but this could have been avoided. As Tom Carey said, they really wanted some documentation and here it was handed to them with a story that was preposterous on its face but they bought everything that was said. In December 2014, without having ever seen the scans, I asked Tom if it could be a mummy. He said no and that they had looked at over 500 pictures of mummies and hadn't found it. They were looking for an exact match rather than at the characteristics of the mummies. Even when Dew exposed that rather poor "screen shot" of something, others suggested mummy. They blew it big time and it is not their only mistake, which takes us back to the Haut interview. Clearly there were problems with the story told by Haut for that affidavit, it was contradicted by everything he had said before and when he began to talk of bodies and a craft, he continued to contradict himself suggesting that this new tale was not based in reality.

Nitram expresses my views perfectly over the fact that NONE of the participants in the Roswell affair, be they primary witnesses or secondary/tertiary ones, ever seems to have kept any diary notes or press reports of any kind.

This is not some trivial matter. You would certainly expect that these witnesses would indeed have kept as much written or printed evidence as possible about such a, supposedly, highly important and significant and unique scientific event IF ANY OF THEM GENUINELY BELIEVED THIS. This would apply to both military witnesses and civilian ones. Yet apparently nobody, not a single one, did so.

The conclusion I draw is that no-one had such pro-ET thoughts at the time, and never did until the advent of the first two investigators, Moore & Friedman, 32 years later.

To return to Walter Haut who, according to his own testimony up to 1993, had never seen the debris at all, but had put out a press release about it in 1947, he then claims he became "convinced" (when?) that it was an ET craft and his base commander ditto, this sounds like fantasy pure and simple. Too good to be true, as they say. Let's forget his second, worthless, affidavit and concentrate more on his dubious first.

While I'm not sure of the validity of generalization from your personal perspective, I will note that, for example, Frank Edwards discussed the Roswell crash suggesting the alien component in 1966, which is documented evidence that part of your analysis is in error.

I will also note that while I don't find it overwhelming that the military personnel didn't make notes or journal entries, it is quite disturbing that the civilians did not. I asked many of them if they had anything like letters, diaries and notes from the time frame and the only diary we found was Ruth Barnett's. It did not confirm the Plains of San Agustin crash.

Let's face it, Haut's 2002 sealed affidavit is riddled with fabricated statements which are inconsistent with what believers tought as absolute gospel.

(17) I would be allowed to make at least one visit to one of the recovery sites during the military cleanup. I would return to the base with some of the wreckage which I would display in my office.

Right. He displayed wreckage in his office and was allowed to take some from the field despite claims that every last living sole (including children) were threatened with death and every last scrap was "vacuumed" from the desert floor to hide the secret forever.

I'm not sure you should be so quick to dismiss that part of the Haut affidavit. Admittedly, what will follow more closely matches your interpretation of the events but there is a historical precedence for it.

According to the Roswell Daily Record of July 9, 1947, "A public relations officer here said the balloon was in his office 'and it'll probably stay right there.'" (Through the article isn't terribly clear on where "here" was and could have been either Fort Worth or Roswell...).

This quote, from 1947, certainly argues for the mundane as opposed to the extraordinary, but it also argues that Haut might not have been completely off-base with his comments. It's up to the reader to determine the significance of it and it demonstrates how something uttered more than a half century ago can come back to confuse us today.

There is no question about the location of the balloon "in his office". The dateline of the newspaper report is Fort Worth, Texas, July 9 (AP). Therefore the location referred to is Ramey's office in Ft Worth, i.e. where the debris was taken to. This can also be determined from three other references to "here" in the report, all of which clearly refer to Ft Worth.

So there was no balloon in any office at Roswell, at least not at the time that AP report was written.

OK, I'll concede the EXTREMELY close-to-zero possibility that what was on show in Ft Worth is merely balloon debris, while the real ET debris was still in Roswell.

Kevin wrote: “Clearly there were problems with the story told by Haut for that affidavit, it was contradicted by everything he had said before and when he began to talk of bodies and a craft, he continued to contradict himself suggesting that this new tale was not based in reality.”

Do you mean originally Haut said he was a lowly nobody? Then around 2000 he began saying he had in fact seen debris, craft, bodies, participated in discussions about it? This doesn't necessarily mean that this was nothing but a tall tale not based in reality, but may indicate towards the end of his life, Haut decided to be more forthcoming, as is true of other witnesses.

You, in fact, have written about other "deathbed" confessions by people reluctant to talk about all that they knew, which you seem to accept, such as provost marshal Edwin Easley, who never directly confessed to knowing of a craft or bodies. Instead (like Haut early on) he addressed it in a round-about way, such as when you asked him about the ET angle answering, "Let me put it this way, it's not the wrong path." How is that so much different as Haut in his original affidavit writing, "I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space," adding in talks words like "just don't ask me why I believe that."

Easley, literally on his deathbed, according to his daughter and doctor, was talking about the "creatures" at Roswell. I could argue, quite unlike Haut's affidavit and recorded interview, that was second-hand, not in an affidavit, never recorded, and could easily be rejected as the delirium of a dying man on morphine or a story made up by his daughter to glorify her Dad. Yet I have yet to hear you call Easley's comments (first or second-hand) "tales" "not based in reality".

As you wrote 2007 on UFO Updates, "I think Easley, an honorable man, told me all that he felt he could say without compromising his integrity. He was very careful about what he would say and wouldn't say. There is no way that he would have said as much as he did had he felt he was violating his oath and responsibilities as an officer.”

Why couldn’t the same be true of Haut? He waited towards the end of his life, being reluctant to say more earlier on, for similar reasons to Easley. A condition of his recorded interview/2nd affidavit was that they could not be released until after his death. If anything, a notarized affidavit and recorded interview while the witness is still of sound mind would be considered much stronger evidence in a court of law than Easley's statements.

You also like to write about Blanchard's adjutant Patrick Saunders writing in the margin of your book, "This is the truth and I never told anybody anything." In your blog back in 2005, you wrote that this "confirmed the extra-terrestrial nature of the crash." But Haut less cryptically saying Blanchard (who you have also written was a very close friend of Haut’s) showed him the actual recovered craft and bodies can't be believed as confirming the ET nature? Why?

You also seem to have accepted for a long time that Haut was at the morning Roswell general staff meeting on July 8, 1947. Were they discussing Mogul balloons at the staff meeting or an ET crash? If the latter (as he states in his affidavit and recorded interview), and which you apparently believe based on your writings, did Haut DIRECTLY know about the ET crash or not, just from the staff meeting? If he knew, then why again do you reject the affidavit and interview as "tales" "not based in reality".

My point is that your rejection of Haut, but not Easley or Saunders, seems entirely arbitrary, even though Haut's ON-RECORD story eventually was much more direct and detailed as to what happened, while Saunders and Easley spoke much more ambiguously and never fully went on the record about ALL they knew. But you reject Haut and not Easley or Saunders. I don’t get it.

Didn't make my point clear. The dateline of the story is Ft. Worth but the paragraph that precedes the quote is about Wilcox in Roswell. The PRO is talking about the balloon, which was probably that from Ramey's office but it showed that Haut could have had debris in his office as he stated, or more importantly, this might be the source of Haut's claim. It is the precedence that is important.

David -

No, I mean that Haut said that he did nothing but write the press release. He told the documentary people in 1979 that he had asked Blanchard if he could see it and was told, "No."

And while it doesn't mean that his later information was fabricated, it does raise a red flag that we need to notice.

The difference with Easley and Saunders is that they were very circumspect in what they said and that they weren't describing the craft and bodies after insisting for decades that their only role had been something on the periphery. Easley told me that he couldn't talk about it and was careful in what he said about the situation. Given he was the provost marshal he would have the responsibility for cordoning the area and would have been required to oversee that aspect of the operation.

And I don't reject Haut, but I do question the reliability of his second affidavit given his history of denying that he had seen anything. I think we all need to be aware of those aspects of the case that suggest we move carefully... but there is one other thing that should be remembered. Neither Easley nor Saunders pointed to witnesses who told whopping huge lies about their involvement in the case. Haut should have known they were not telling the truth if he had the inside track that he claimed.

"The PRO is talking about the balloon, which was probably that from Ramey's office but it showed that Haut could have had debris in his office as he stated, or more importantly, this might be the source of Haut's claim. It is the precedence that is important."

Perhaps, but we can't be sure who this is referencing and where.

Let's suppose then that Haut did go out to a recovery site (with Blanchard's permission) and he collected a large metallic sample of the alien craft with the intention of "displaying" it in his office.

1) Why was he the ONLY one to be allowed to keep a sample?

2) Why would he "display" the very material that people claimed they were threatened about discussing (or keeping as in Brazel Jr.'s case) in his office, and for whom and what purpose?

3) Where is that piece today and why didn't he show it to you (or Carey and Schmitt or Friedman) or tell his daughter to disclose it upon his death to back up his new and final claims?

While speculative, I surmise the article referenced the Fort Worth balloon debris or at the very least balloon material that perhaps Marcel brought in to show Blanchard which found its way to the morning brief. In either case it doesn't answer our questions and his statement seems (to me) to be embellishment (or false memory) to give weight to his final testimony.

I still argue the point that someone somewhere would still have a piece of this remarkable material having found some way to squirrel it away as proof that they "were there" on that momentous day that we discovered we weren't alone in the universe.

Just like the lack of diary evidence both military and civilian, it seems no one thought this event importantant enough to collect a souvenier the way Haut claimed it happened in his final affidavit.

Kevin said"I will also note that while I don't find it overwhelming that the military personnel didn't make notes or journal entries, it is quite disturbing that the civilians did not. I asked many of them if they had anything like letters, diaries and notes from the time frame and the only diary we found was Ruth Barnett's. It did not confirm the Plains of San Agustin crash."

I don't understand why you think its "quite disturbing" that the civilians you asked did not have any letter, diaries or notes abou the crash other than Barnett. In my 61 years of being on this earth, I can't think of anyone I have personally known who has ever kept a diary or journal outside of their employment. Nor do I know of anyone who has kept every letter they have ever received their whole life. I have personally written thousands of "notes" about thousands of things, but the only ones I could currently produce if someone asked me for any of them MIGHT be those I wrote in the last couple days, because they usually end up in the trash very quickly. People just don't document everything, important or not, that happens in their lives.

For example, the birth of a person I know very intimately (well...actually me) was publicized in the Washington Post in D.C. in 1955 because I was born on January 1 that year (a "New Year's baby" as was commonly coined). On Sunday, January 1, 2006, the Post publicized a first page followup article about me and other D.C. New Year's babies. However, if one were to ask my parents, my older siblings, my numerous older cousins, aunts and uncles who love me whether they had any diaries, journal entries, notes or any other documentation about my birth, they would say no, other than copies of the Post articles.

Of course, their lack of documentation of my birth may be reflective of their opinion of me LOL, but my point is, the fact that you have not been able to locate any civilian-generated documentation, doesn't dampen the validity of the Roswell event in my view because many people, if not most, just don't document anything.

The difference with Easley and Saunders is that they were very circumspect in what they said and that they weren't describing the craft and bodies after insisting for Edecades that their only role had been something on the periphery.

This argument still makes NO sense. All three men initially said they were on the periphery. One (Haut) towards the end of his life agrees to be more forthcoming, but only if what he says is not disclosed until after his death, thus, in a way honoring an oath, like Easley. Haut does a recorded oral interview (Connors, 2000) and signs an affidavit (written by Schmitt, 2002) specifically admitting to being a first-hand witness to a craft and alien body recovery and attending the staff meeting when all this was all discussed. This somehow makes him not believable for being explicit and providing details after initially saying he didn't know much.

But Easley tells you little, never goes fully on the record, but remains believable by only dropping hints to you that the ET explanation is not the wrong path to take. Also (according to daughter and doctor) talking about the "creatures" at Roswell on his literal deathbed. No recorded interviews, no affidavits, no direct admissions. The only recorded interview I'm aware of where Easley directly admits to something more than a stupid balloon recovery is where he told you he was sworn to secrecy by Truman (or Truman's rep--another story).

Saunders said much less, only writing an inscription in your book "This is the truth and I never told anybody anything." The "truth" in this case, you have written, is the section of the book about his participation in covering up the paper trail, which is interesting and incriminating, indicating a cover-up of something highly significant, but not exactly the same, as you have also written, as confirming, "the extra-terrestrial nature of the crash." He "never told anybody anything", thus somehow making himself more believable than Haut.

Honestly, Kevin, I just don't get it.

Easley told me that he couldn't talk about it and was careful in what he said about the situation. Given he was the provost marshal he would have the responsibility for cordoning the area and would have been required to oversee that aspect of the operation.

Meaning he was also supervising, at the very least, the picking up of the debris (as some witnesses, like Rickett, indicated he was), which by the vast majority of accounts (Marcel, Rickett, Exon, etc) was highly anomalous, with some saying not of human manufacture (e.g., Marcel, Exon). Easley also admitted to incarcerating Brazel at the base, again something that cannot be explained by something like Brazel finding a few pounds of nondescript balloon debris. And if Easley was talking about the "creatures" at Roswell on his deathbed, then he also likely would have seen them directly and had a strong emotional response to have even been discussing them at the very end.

Easley would also have not had to swear an oath to the President if all he had was a peripheral role in a relative non-event (which would include a Mogul balloon crash). I can only conclude that at face value from the little he did say, he knew a great deal but took most of his secrets to the grave. I still don't understand why this makes him more believable than Haut, who at the end, chose not to.

Perhaps, but let's bear in mind that in 1947 there was no Internet, email, or social media where today most people document their lives.

Phone, mail, and Western Union are the most obvious sources of additional documentation (if it exists) including the diaries that haven't been found. While speculative, my hunch is that back then men kept journals for perhaps work, and women for personal reasons. I would bet women were more likely to keep personal diaries then men, which is not to say no men did the same.

With the large number of vintage letters on the antique market today, as well as Western Union transmissions, it would seem something would have been kept by someone if it referenced alien visitation as the event of the millenium. And yet no such thing has surfaced, nor has anyone even tried to fake such things.

On an interview he did on BBC Radio 2 not long before he died, a listener asked about Roswell. (I have the exact quote noted somewhere) He said basically that he later found out that they had things at Wright Field that they weren't supposed to have.

Hughie Green was someone who proved to be good at keeping secrets during his lifetime.

When I was growing up there was a woman who kept the keys to the Square we lived in, who, as I recall it set the questions for the top-rated game show that Hughie Green hosted - Double Your Money. Her name was Ann or Anne Mayo and she lived about 2 doors away from where I'd lived the first 4 years of my life. We moved to the other side of the square, next door to a Fleet Street journalist/author and his wife. I've found out that this man met and was photographed with Mussolini, Ramsay MacDonald and General Balbo, on March 18th 1933. This was the same year that a flying saucer is supposed to have crashed in Italy, according to some.

It is quite disturbing because, in 1947, many people keep journals and diaries. In 1947, people wrote letters to one another frequently. People saved those letters. I have many letters my father wrote to my grandmother while he was serving in the Pacific in World War II. I have all the letters that I wrote home and were saved by my mother during my tour in Vietnam... and ironically, I have all the emails that my wife and I exchanged while I was in Iraq. In 1947 things were different and people wrote all these things down. We have, basically, a single witness to the Plains of San Agustin and his wife kept a daily journal in 1947... not that it makes anyone happy since it is clear that Barney Barnett didn't see anything strange in 1947, but that's an argument for another time.

The fact that you, born in the 1950s, don't have the letters or diaries just proves that you are of another generation... and if we go back far enough, why we have literally thousands of journals kept by Civil War soldiers, and those people who trekked across the United States to the west. There should be something available. We should have stumbled across something but we have not and if you think about it in terms of the generation of the 1940s, you'll understand that we should have found something. I mean, it was literally, in all the newspapers.

If you just don't get it, I doubt there is anything I can say that will explain the difference. Walter spent, literally, decades telling us that his only role was to write the press release. Everything we had reinforced that idea. That he believed that what fell was alien was born of his belief structure and not anything he observed, or so it seemed until he radically altered his story.

Edwin Easley told me what he believed he could without violating the oath he took. He was as helpful as he believed he could be and didn't radically alter his story. He answered my questions as best he could, given the oath he had taken, which, he made quite clear in my first interview with him. His best course of action would have been to deny everything, but he was an honest man trying to keep his oath without lying about the situation.

Patrick Saunders was even more circumspect, telling me that he didn't know anything about the "little green bodies." He did mention to family, briefly what he had done to keep the secret. You can eliminate him for that reason if you desire, but the point is that he didn't actually deny there had been bodies, but made fun of the notion. He talked about his role in hiding the paper trail which is not the same thing as suddenly revealing that he was hip deep on the inside.

We're not really talking about what all these other people did or saw or said, but about Walter telling us one thing for decades and then telling us something completely different, putting himself in the middle of the story. It is a matter of degree and of what he said, not what others said.

What I find interesting about Roswell is what appears to be the construction of a myth by well meaning people in and out of the military.

In my opinion, most of the primary and secondary witnesses were trying to provide relevant information based on their memories. Unfortunately, memories are subject to distortions and projections depending on what is occurring during recall.

Now, if they only had a cave and a campfire they would have taken the charcoal sticks and painted their story on the cave wall based on their frame of reference (period). In the late 1940's their frame of reference was the recent report of "flying saucers" from the newspaper, secrecy, and the new threat of an arms race. If I don't know what it is, I may project on the situation what I would like to see.

I am not suggesting that extraterrestrial beings have never visited this planet via probes or ships, only that Roswell appears to be a case of mistaken identification.

Reflecting on the Roswell case over the last few days a few additional points seem pertinent.

Within the very large number of alleged witnesses there are some which have been shown to false or over which varying degrees of doubt as their credibility have been raised.There are however a significant number of high credibility witnesses who were clearly present at the time who give a broadly consistent picture of the general nature of the event, allowing for their different roles and responsibilities. I would include in this group (Major (later Lt-Col) Marcel, Dr Marcel, Colonel (later Brigadier) DuBose, and a number of other officers and senior NCOs such as Easley, Barton, Ricketts etc.). Whilst secondary witnesses are clearly usually less relevant, the report from Chester Lyttle is I feel also from a high credibility source.

I do not know if Haut held back the full extent of his involvement and knowledge until later years or if he elaborated his role (or was led to that by others). The inconsistencies within statements do have to be considered.

Overall though we have a scenario in which we can clearly demonstrate:a) the recovery of debrisb) A significant military reaction (the initial dispatching of intelligence and counter-intelligence personnel to recover the debris and the weather balloon cover story)c) The elimination of all known conventional explanations for what this debris wasd) A broadly consistent set of witness statements from personnel directly involved (Captain (later Colonel) Cavitt is the obvious exception - any others???)

After the case became public the scenario then developed in a predictable way:a) Enormous confusion arising from a mass of hoax witnessesb) A very serious effort to provide a more credible solution to the case (NYU flight 4)c) Discovery that communication records for the 509th for the time period have been lost (what a surprise)d) The falsification of the Flight 4 hypothesise) Continuing enormous amounts of noise

All of which makes me think there is something to this. One area I have been interested in for some time is the coincidence (?) of timing. Other UFO waves came and went before 1947. Early July 1847 marked the start of sustained interest in the UFO situation by US authorities. The documentation seems to suggest this began just prior to the Roswell events but I have been curious for some time as to why 1947 was different to the Ghost rockets or the Foo Fighters or various earlier comparable 'flaps' in terms of sustained investigation and in particular the subsequent RDB involvement in events.

Brian's point about Haut displaying some of the debris in his office is certainly a significant one. How could Haut ever do this when others involved were threatened with death if they did likewise, and when Brazel jr even had it confiscated some 2 years later. He apparently got away with it for nearly 2 years (or maybe only a few weeks according to which account you believe).

It is just too idiotic to suppose Haut alone was allowed or able to retain some of the great ET debris. And if it was "on display" in his office, how many visitors to that office managed to view it? Did anyone ever ask about it or photograph it?

But I do not even accept his first affidavit, let alone his second, as having any value whatever. He was "convinced" the debris was from an ET craft, even in his first affidavit, although he had never seen any of it himself. Who convinced him, I wonder? An official scientific committee's report of their findings, maybe?

David Rudiak is right about one thing. Haut is no more, and no less, believeable than Easley and/or Saunders.

Let's face it, ETHers can believe, or disbelieve, whoever they want in this (very) twisted tale. The variations are fascinating and endless.

I understand your reasoning but wish to point out that while to some extent a few of the witnesses have been consistent individually often times they aren't consistent when compared to each other.

We can perhaps dismiss this as poor memory, but to some degree they should be consistent.

For example, Marcel Sr. recalled the "beams" he found to be like square rod with symbols akin to slashes or diagonal lines. This is what he drew. His famous first video interview merely stated "we didn't know what it was".

His son, Marcel Jr. described "metal I-beams" with embossed purple symbols completely unlike what his father described. I can only assume they observed the same wreckage and yet we have two very different depictions of the debris.

Who is more correct? The father who was deeply involved or the pre-teen son who handled some wreckage for a short period of time one evening?

Marcel Sr.'s description could be interpreted as exactly what Rawin targets were made of, light weight lacquered wooden square rods.

On further note, Marcel Sr. changed his mind THREE times regarding what was depicted in the press photos (the real deal, then a mix of the two, then substituted material).

Many point out that the USAF changed its mind FOUR times in regards to an explanation, yet ignore Marcel Sr. having changed his mind THREE times to get his story correct and in-line with alien theorists.

These details seem to present INCONSISTENT testimony from star witnesses. To say that both men were consistent because they described beams with symbols is not sufficient.

I don't recall the source, but I do recall reading that Marcel Sr. once took issue with his son's description of I-Beams stating quote, "Why Jesse has no right.." when describing them as I-Beams. If I can find the source again I will post it.

Food for thought....why didn't Haut describe the debris he displayed in his final affidavit?

Actually, the changes that you refer to were actually made as Bill Moore altered the transcript of his telephonic conversations with Marcel so that it matched the facts as they were being uncovered. There is a subtle difference between an institution changing its story when they are in possession of the information and an individual seemingly changing his decades after the fact. The Air Force, according to what is known, admitted to lying about their earlier explanations, Marcel did not admit to lying about any aspect of what he said (and before we're dragged into a discussion that is off the rails, I will happily note that we see embellishments in Marcel's tale). You could argue that Marcel was attempting to assist in the investigations while the Air Force was attempting to stymie them.

If you have looked at the "I-beam" that Jesse Jr. described and the squared-off beam that his father described, you see that the differences are slight given the size of the I-beam. The symbols as described by Jesse Sr. do not match those described by his son, but then none of them match that described by Bessie Brazel and certainly don't match those suggested by Charles Moore.

And while they both observed the same wreckage, is it no possible that they saw different symbols and not the same ones? Or that the senior Marcel, saw additional symbols when he looked at other bits of the debris... I mean if we want to attempt to be dispassionate in what we are discussing.

And I will assume that in the quote you can't (at this time source) you meant, "Why Jesse was not right..." which is closer to what Senior said. He didn't remember the I-beam like structure.

"The Air Force, according to what is known, admitted to lying about their earlier explanations...."

The Air Force did no such thing. When did they ever admit to lying about Roswell? I never saw anything where some AF spokesman said "we lied about Roswell".

The real story, as told in AF publications, is that after some 47 years the USAF merely decided that the debris was, very likely, part of a trial Mogul balloon instead of part of a common or garden weather balloon (with radar reflectors attached).

Hardly much of a different story, is it?

True, they initially put out a rushed press release about recovering a 'flying disc', which topic was all the rage at the time, but corrected this the following day. You and others just love to tell us the USAF 'lied' about it all. It would indeed be a lie if the AF KNEW the debris actually came from an ET craft and then tried to fob the public off with a phony baloney balloon story. This would be, in Churchill's words, a serious 'terminological inexactitude'.

You tell us that is precisely what they did, and have been doing, fooling the stupid public and scientific establishment for 7 decades over the greatest event in scientific history. An amazing achievement!

Those guys at the top of the USAF are just plain liars. In the end that is what Roswell is all about, isn't it?

They changed their story from a weather balloon to a top secret balloon known as Mogul and yet, Mogul was not highly classified, the name was known to those who worked on the project and everything they were doing in New Mexico was out in the open for all to see. That seems to be shading the truth somewhat (oh, sure, the ultimate purpose, to spy on the Soviets seems to have been classified but that isn't exactly what they, and a bunch of others has been saying).

They told us that the bodies seen were anthropomorphic dummies dropped over New Mexico as much as a decade later but there doesn't seem to be good evidence that those experiments would have resulted in these dummies landing in the Roswell area. That doesn't sound exactly like the truth to me... but again, this is about Walter Haut. Yes, it's my fault. I opened that door.

"And while they both observed the same wreckage, is it no possible that they saw different symbols and not the same ones?"

Possibly, but the "I-beam" story is a core part of the so-called eye witness evidence. Did this spacecraft have every conceivable sized part and shape in its structure? I think not. As Marcel Sr. Pointed out, his son didn't have it right. That's a mark of inconsistency.

And what about Haut? Again no one knows where HIS piece of debris went, what it was, and why he claimed to have been given permission to collect it and display it when others weren't.

I would think he would have described it in more detail or at least produced it for Schmitt but he didn't. This just seems like more myth making. So I agree, his final affidavit should not be considered as any sort of evidence.

Again, if you look at the reconstruction of the I-beam created by Jesse Jr., and you listen to what Jesse Sr. said, you realize that they both could have been describing the same thing. The cross pieces of the are minuscule so it could be that Sr. didn't see them... or that Jr. thought they were there. I'm not sure this I-beam thing is a core part of the story anyway.

As for Haut, in all the interviews and discussions I had with him, he never mentioned it. And then there was Walt Whitmore, Jr. who claimed to have some of the debris that he was going to give to the museum... you would think that Haut, wanting the museum to be a success would have mentioned it... unless, of course, it proved to be something mundane or that he never had anything at all.

Does Nitram, I wonder, have any views on Haut's infamous second affidavit? That is what this blog is supposed to be about. Please, will he tell us, and thus contribute to the debate.

Does he have any views on Haut's less infamous first affidavit? After all this man, having never seen the debris (or so he claimed up to about 1993), was nonetheless convinced it was part of a visiting spacecraft. Clever guy, wasn't he?

Perhaps Nitram can also answer the question I put before. Who 'convinced' Haut of this? Any ideas, or shouldn't I repeat silly questions?

Maybe not, but the description of the debris and its properties is a key factor that many point to as evidence of alien contact. If the descriptions are different (and they are to a degree between some who handled it), it raises the question whether or not we are dealing with simple differences in people's descriptions of similar or identical exotic material, or exaggerated recollections of ordinary material.

We can hardly ignore the material descriptions without jeopardizing the story, unless as CDA has hinted perhaps nothing crashed at all. I believe something did crash and inconsistencies in the description of just what seems relevant.

My emphasis was on the word 'crash'. The contemporary reports merely talk about the landing and recovery of a light instrument. Even the FBI teletype refers to such. The 'crash' aspect came in decades later when certain investigators got involved, and we have been stuck with it ever since. A crash implies something large & heavy, and maybe manned.

So yes, nothing crashed at all, but something undoubtedly landed. Strange that Haut's first affidavit only talks about an instrument being found, but his second uses the word 'crash'.

But maybe we shouldn't worry ourselves too much about these trivia!

[I presume Nitram will now tell us how I have re-iterated this for the umpteenth time]

CDA prattled:My emphasis was on the word 'crash'. The contemporary reports merely talk about the landing and recovery of a light instrument. Even the FBI teletype refers to such. The 'crash' aspect came in decades later when certain investigators got involved, and we have been stuck with it ever since. A crash implies something large & heavy, and maybe manned.

The "contemporary reports" are whatever what CDA wants them to be, always overlooking the "contemporary reports" that are at odds with the ones he wants to believe.

Thus Marcel in "contemporary reports" was ALSO quoted saying debris was scattered over a square mile and Ramey/Pentagon saying the so-called disc or "box-kite" was 20-25 feet across if reconstructed.

If you quote those also "contemporary reports", it would indeed sound like something much larger than a "light instrument". And being scattered over a "square mile" implies something far different than a simple landing. This alternate perspective on what happened had nothing to do with "certain investigators" getting involved and somehow changing the story.

"Contemporary reports" don't always tell us the full story. "Contemporary reports" only tell us what was reported. If a matter is classified, the truth may not come out for a very long time afterward, sometimes by interviewing the actual witnesses to what happened, which is what "certain investigators" did. The fact that certain details came out decades later does not somehow automatically invalidate them.

So yes, nothing crashed at all, but something undoubtedly landed.

So how did it get scattered over a square mile?

Strange that Haut's first affidavit only talks about an instrument being found, but his second uses the word 'crash'.

MORE strange is that Haut's first affidavit does NOT talk about an "instrument" being found, rather material from a flying saucer. So CDA is fabricating his "facts" again. See for yourself:

www.roswellproof.com/haut.html

Quote: "At approximately 9:30 AM on July 8, I received a call from Col. William Blanchard, the base commander, who said he had in his possession a flying saucer or parts thereof." [Note, no "instrument"]

Quote: "I believe Col. Blanchard saw the material, because he sounded positive about what the material was. There is no chance that he would have mistaken it for a weather balloon. Neither is their any chance that Major Marcel would have been mistaken.

In 1980, Jesse Marcel told me that the material photographed in Gen. Ramey's office was not the material he had recovered.

I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space.

Where is CDA's "instrument" in the first Haut affidavit? It is ALWAYS referred to as the "material" recovered and being from a flying saucer.

(Not that it matters, but the second affidavit uses the word "crash" only once, as in "crash debris" that Haut personally examined, also referring to it thrice as "wreckage", mentioning an "extensive debris field", but also being far more explict, with "downed vehicle" and "craft and crew from outer space".)

"Does Nitram, I wonder, have any views on Haut's infamous second affidavit? That is what this blog is supposed to be about. Please, will he tell us, and thus contribute to the debate.

Does he have any views on Haut's less infamous first affidavit? After all this man, having never seen the debris (or so he claimed up to about 1993), was nonetheless convinced it was part of a visiting spacecraft. Clever guy, wasn't he?

Perhaps Nitram can also answer the question I put before. Who 'convinced' Haut of this? Any ideas, or shouldn't I repeat silly questions?"

CDA, Roswell is a complicated case and cannot be solved with theories that enter your mind in that precise millisecond, as Don has pointed out previously.

For what it's worth I don't believe that Haut saw any bodies... But for the 262nd time, this is not a debate about whether there are bodies but an investigation into the incident.

Once again though, you are getting a bit of a hammering from "Roswell Authority" David Rudiak. I would have to agree with DR that "something crashed", rather than simply "landed"...My recommendation to you in future, if you are unsure about something (and you are unsure about most things Roswellian), to avoid looking foolish, you are better off asking a question... rather than making a statement that is easily rebuffed.

"But for the 262nd time, this is not a debate about whether there are bodies but an investigation into the incident."

Any proper investigation into this 'incident' will have to involve whether bodies were seen and whether they existed. Ask Kevin if in doubt. Why do you think the USAF followed their 1994 report (which omitted all mention of bodies) with their 1997 one (which DID deal with the bodies, or attempted to)?

I notice you put "Roswell Authority" in quotes when describing David Rudiak. Is this a subtle way of hinting that perhaps he is not such an authority after all?

My recommendation to you is that in future you state your own beliefs clearly and concisely. Then we can proceed to debate them (or investigate them if you prefer).

I am enjoying the spirited discussions on the various threads of your blog.

I noticed that Mylar was used as camera film in some bombers during WW2. In the YouTube video (link above) Jesse Marcel Jr. makes reference to the Mylar (Ludwig/DuPont) material being similar to what he held in 1947.

Are you, or your fellow bloggers, aware of any research projects in the late 1940's using a aerial camera with Mylar camera film, and a high altitude balloon.

The reason I ask is if the Russians reverse engineered the B29 into the TU-4, there remains the possibility they reengineered the camera on board a B29. As for the Egyptian hieroglyphs, some Russian letters could be construed as looking like hieroglyphs. Just a though, although no evidence as of yet to support it.